LAUREN BACALL, DISTINCTIVE VOICE AND SULTRY LOOKS

Today, The Grandma has been watching some classic films. She has enjoyed a lot especially with Murder on the Orient Express, the film based on the book of Agatha Christie that includes incredible performances in its 1974 version. One of the actresses of this masterpiece is Lauren Bacall.

 

The Grandma loves her films and she has wanted to watch some of them to homage this wonderful actress who was born in The Bronx, New York City. Lauren Bacall is a legend of arts and cinema, a great actress with an interesting career and amazing live. 

 

Lauren Bacall (born Betty Joan Perske; September 16, 1924-August 12, 2014) was an American actress known for her distinctive voice and sultry looks. She was named the 20th-greatest female star of classic Hollywood cinema by the American Film Institute and received an Academy Honorary Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2009 in recognition of her central place in the Golden Age of motion pictures.

Bacall began her career as a model before making her film debut as a leading lady in To Have and Have Not (1944). She continued in the film noir genre with appearances with Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), and Key Largo (1948), and she starred in the romantic comedies How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) with Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable, and Designing Woman (1957) with Gregory Peck. She co-starred with John Wayne in his final film The Shootist (1976) by Wayne's personal request. She also worked on Broadway in musicals, earning Tony Awards for Applause (1970) and Woman of the Year (1981). She won a Golden Globe Award and was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996).

 

More information: Biography

Lauren Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske on September 16, 1924, in The Bronx, New York City, the only child of Natalie (née Weinstein; 1901–1977), a secretary who later legally changed her surname to Bacal, and William Perske (1889–1982), who worked in sales. Both her parents were Jewish. According to Bacall, her mother emigrated from Iași, the Kingdom of Romania, through Ellis Island, and her father was born in New Jersey to parents who were born in Valozhyn, a significant center of Jewish life, in present-day Belarus, then in the Russian Empire.

In 1941, Bacall took lessons at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, where she was classmates with Kirk Douglas, while working as a theatre usher at the St. James Theatre and fashion model.

She made her acting debut on Broadway in 1942, at age 17, as a walk-on in Johnny 2 X 4. By then, she lived with her mother at 75 Bank Street, and in 1942, she was crowned Miss Greenwich Village.

As a teenage fashion model, she appeared on the cover of Harper's Bazaar, as well as in magazines such as Vogue. She was noted for her cat-like grace, tawny blonde hair, and blue-green eyes.

The Harper's Bazaar cover caught the attention of Hollywood producer and director Howard Hawks' wife Slim, who urged Hawks to have Bacall take a screen test for To Have and Have Not.

After meeting Bacall in Hollywood, Hawks immediately signed her to a seven-year contract, with a weekly salary of $100, and personally began to manage her career. He changed her first name to Lauren, and she chose Bacall (a variant of her mother's maiden name) as her screen surname.

After To Have and Have Not, Bacall was seen opposite Charles Boyer in Confidential Agent (1945), which was poorly received by critics. By her own estimation, it could have caused considerable damage to her career, but her next performance as the mysterious, acid-tongued Vivian Rutledge in Hawks's film noir The Big Sleep (1946), co-starring Bogart, provided a quick career resurgence.

Bacall was cast with Bogart in two more films. In Dark Passage (1947), another film noir, she played an enigmatic San Francisco artist.  And, in 1948, she was in John Huston's melodramatic suspense film Key Largo with Bogart, Edward G. Robinson and Lionel Barrymore.

Bacall turned down scripts she did not find interesting, and thereby earned a reputation for being difficult. Despite this, she further solidified her star status in the 1950s by appearing as the leading lady in a string of films that won favorable reviews.

Bacall was cast opposite Gary Cooper in Bright Leaf (1950). In the same year, she played a two-faced femme fatale in Young Man with a Horn (1950), a jazz musical co-starring Kirk Douglas, Doris Day, and Hoagy Carmichael.

From 1951 to 1952, Bacall co-starred with Bogart in the syndicated action-adventure radio series Bold Venture.

In 1953, she starred in the CinemaScope comedy How to Marry a Millionaire, a runaway hit among critics and at the box office. Directed by Jean Negulesco and co-starring Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable, Bacall got positive notices for her turn as the witty gold-digger, Schatze Page.

In 1955, a television version of Bogart's breakthrough film, The Petrified Forest, was performed as a live installment of Producers' Showcase, a weekly dramatic anthology, featuring Bogart as Duke Mantee, Henry Fonda as Alan, and Bacall as Gabrielle, the part originally played in the 1936 movie by Bette Davis. Bacall starred in two feature films, The Cobweb and Blood Alley.

More information: ET Online

Many film scholars consider Written on the Wind, directed by Douglas Sirk in 1956, to be a landmark work in the melodrama genre. Appearing with Rock Hudson, Dorothy Malone and Robert Stack, Bacall played a career woman whose life is unexpectedly turned around by a family of oil magnates. Bacall wrote in her autobiography that she did not think much of the role, but reviews were favorable.

While struggling at home with Bogart's battle with esophageal cancer, Bacall starred with Gregory Peck in Designing Woman to solid reviews.

Bacall was seen in only a handful of films in the 1960s. She starred on Broadway in Goodbye, Charlie in 1959, and went on to have a successful on-stage career in Cactus Flower (1965), Applause (1970), and Woman of the Year (1981). The few films Bacall made during this period were all-star vehicles such as Sex and the Single Girl (1964) with Henry Fonda, Tony Curtis, and Natalie Wood; Harper (1966) with Paul Newman, Shelley Winters, Julie Harris, Robert Wagner, and Janet Leigh; and Murder on the Orient Express (1974), with Ingrid Bergman, Albert Finney, Vanessa Redgrave, Martin Balsam, and Sean Connery.

In 1981, Bacall appeared in star vehicle The Fan. The film received mixed reviews, but her performance got a favorable reception.

Bacall was featured in Robert Altman's Health (1980) and Michael Winner's Appointment with Death (1988). In 1990, she had a small role in Misery which starred Kathy Bates and James Caan.

In 1997, she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her role in The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996), her first nomination after a career span of more than 50 years. She had already won a Golden Globe and was widely expected to win the Oscar, but she lost to Juliette Binoche for The English Patient.

Bacall received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1997, and she was voted one of the 25 most significant female movie stars in history in 1999 by the American Film Institute.

More information: Independent

In July 2013, Bacall expressed interest in the film Trouble Is My Business. In November, she joined the English dub voice cast for StudioCanal's animated film Ernest & Celestine. Her final role was in 2014, a guest vocal appearance in the Family Guy episode Mom's the Word.

On May 21, 1945, Bacall married Humphrey Bogart. Their wedding and honeymoon took place at Malabar Farm, Lucas, Ohio, the country home of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Bromfield, a close friend of Bogart. Their marriage ended with Bogart's death in 1957.

During the filming of The African Queen (1951), Bacall and Bogart became friends with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. She began to mix in non-acting circles, becoming friends with the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and the journalist Alistair Cooke.

In 1952, she gave campaign speeches for Democratic presidential contender Adlai Stevenson. Along with other Hollywood figures, Bacall was a staunch opponent of McCarthyism.

Bacall then met and began a relationship with Jason Robards. Their marriage was originally scheduled to take place in Vienna, Austria, on June 16, 1961; however, the plans were shelved after Austrian authorities refused to grant the pair a marriage license. They were refused a marriage also in Las Vegas, Nevada. On July 4, 1961, the couple drove to Ensenada, Mexico, where they wed. The couple divorced in 1969. According to Bacall's autobiography, she divorced Robards mainly because of his alcoholism.

Bacall was a staunch liberal Democrat, and proclaimed her political views on numerous occasions. Bacall and Bogart were among about 80 Hollywood personalities to send a telegram protesting the House Un-American Activities Committee's investigations of Americans suspected of Communism. The telegram said that investigating individuals' political beliefs violated the basic principles of American democracy.

In October 1947, Bacall and Bogart traveled to Washington, D.C., along with a number of other Hollywood stars in a group that called itself the Committee for the First Amendment (CFA), which also included Danny Kaye, John Garfield, Gene Kelly, John Huston, Ira Gershwin and Jane Wyatt.

Bacall died on August 12, 2014, one month before her 90th birthday, at her longtime apartment in The Dakota, the Upper West Side building near Central Park in Manhattan.

More information: The Guardian I, II & III

 

That was my original dream, anyway, to be on stage.

I think the stage is an actor's place because actors,

it belongs to you.

Lauren Bacall